The Memory Police

Not to generalise too much, but there is something very atmospheric I have noticed about Japanese media. In music, Aoba reminds me of this, and in literature so did this book. It is really hard for me to write down what I actually mean, I don’t particularly remember it now. Not well, at least.

However I do remember reading the book and feeling something of a dystopia, melancholic air surrounding me. The translation was fantastic, at least in the sense that I really enjoyed the book. It was another kind of dystopia, much more subtle—of course the presence of the memory police is by no means a subtle indicator—but the actual, overwhelming origin of it came differently, through this very distant, cold feeling. Perhaps like walking in a brutalist wasteland in the harsh winter.

A few things can be said about the characters, and the somewhat scandalous but at the end normalised romance at the end of it all, and the story inside of it, but I don’t know how I feel about them, so I’ll perhaps come back to this later.